I wanted to provide a short update to let you know that things are still very difficult in Nepal due to the flooding that occurred. Tejanath was able to send me a few instant messages this week, but consistent access to electricity is still problematic. It has been over a month since Tejanath and I have been able to have a conversation due to the difficult situation.
I heard again this week from the Nepali Federation from the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. We have not submitted the proposal they requested as of today's date. I explained the situation to our contact there and they were very understanding. This was the response that I received back;
"I understand the sitution may the life in the eastern hills are still difficult because there is still having heavy rain, However after Oct. 2008 I will be able to have a treak to there and visit the deaf childrens and adults there. I have been thinking to send there a teachere immeditely as the deaf childrens in the resource class there need to be needy thus even there are 4-8 adults I am ready to support them, as I know this is a remote hilly region of Nepal."
That's all I have to update on for now. I'll continue to keep you posted as I hear more from Tejanath. Hopefully he will be able to update soon on the local situation himself.
Tejanath and I were finally able to connect briefly on Saturday for about a 10 min chat before he lost power again. He is fine-there is no flooding in Khandbari because this is a hilly area, but the electricty issue continues to be problematic...my understanding is that this IS related to problems stemming from the flooding.
Tejanath has been busy working with the Arun Valley Concern Center to develop an eco-tourism project. Some of you may have seen the Sankuwasabha project posted here at Nabuur. This is for that project. We talked about whether or not this should be a separate village, or included here with ours-or alternatively if maybe we need to close this village and focus on helping them with the eco-tourism project. The entire idea behind this is that if SESF is able to partner with the Arun Valley Concern Center and develop a source of revenue from tourism into the region that they will be in a much better position to meet their goals of ongoing child sponsorship. Just as I asked what Tejanath's preference was...we lost power again, but he did tell me before he left that he sees this project functioning as one instead of two separate villages. I have emailed Romina about this already. Tejanath said he would email me as soon as he had power again.
We also spoke about the school for the deaf. I have heard from the Project Manager at the Nepali Federation for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing and he is considering a trip to the school himself sometime in October to better assess the situation. I still hope we will be able to partner with them for more help for the school.
I apologize for the delays and lack of information here, but it has been very difficult to move things forward without being able to talk with Tejanath on a regular basis. I wanted you all to know that he is doing fine. Hopefully the electricity situation will improve soon.
Here we are all fine and everything is ok. Now we (SESF and the Arun Valley concern Centre) are going to publish a website entitled WWW.SANKHUWASABHA.COM soon. I thik it will be published very soon. The designer says it.
I hope our website will be an informative as well as commercial type.
Through the site we hope to earn some money and would like to be self dependent in the future.
I wonder it is possiboe to merge the program into our own Khandbari village.So no other village is necessary to post in the Nabuur.
Firstly we will publish the website. Then we will discussabout it.
Tejanath and I were able to talk for quite awhile this morning. This is the first time we've really been able to have a discussion of any length since the flood due to the problem with the electricity and our substantial time difference. The website that Tejanath mentioned www.sankhuwasabha.com has been published. Please take a look at it.
Over the next few weeks, Tejanath and I will be working together to shift the focus of this project toward a tourism concept that the local community wishes to develop. We have had many talks about what could be done to help SESF achieve independence and Tejanath believes that this is a step in the right direction for getting there. SESF has partnered with the Arun Valley Concern Center and the hope is that by working together-SESF will be able to utilize a portion of any incoming revenue as a reliable source of income. They will still need to work on finding donors and other means of financial support as well, but it is hoped that any revenue generatated by this effort will form a consistent foundation of financial support to keep the organization moving forward and help them achieve their goals. The goals of SESF have not changed. They still exist to provide scholarships and a means of financial support for children to go to school who might not otherwise be able to afford it-primarily girls. Tejanath is very excited about the work they have done so far and hopes to post a message tomorrow to tell you more about it.
Sorry for my being late to post any message for a long time. It was because of the problem of electricity, I was unable to have a chat with Mrs. Jennifer wells.
Any I was able to have a chat with her yesterday evening. It was interesting. We had a long chat for about one and a half hour about our project.
It is my pleasure to inform you all that SESF with collaborationof the Arun Valley Concern Centre Khandbari would like help develop tourism business in the district through modern information technology. In this connection we are going to publish a website entitled
In the website we are going to publish the information about the natural, cultural, biological and historical diversities of the district so that we can attract more and more tourists in the district. Around 1000 tourists have been coming to our district for various purposes every year.
We are also intending to publish advertisements of the various organization related to the tourism business like hotels , guest houses, restaurants ,herbs traders, etc and get some money from them We will also put information of government line agencies and non governmental organizations. We are thinking to put the local weekly news paper published in Khandbari so that the people from Sankhuwasabha living in the various parts of the world can read it and enjoy it With the money we are planning to execute all the programs of SESF independently in a sustainable way.
The website is being designed in Kathmandu by Best Nepal. Some parts of the website has been recently published. Please have a look at the website and and post your valuable suggestions.
I would also like to request you all to donate just a little ( if possible) and help SESF to pay for the site. It has been very difficult for SESF to pay the charge of site designers now.
Several months ago, I shared information with Tejanath about an organization called Stuff Your Rucksack (www.stuffyourrucksack.com). Tejanath was recently contacted by Bradt Travel Guides in the UK. Apparently, each month they feature a different charity from Stuff Your Ruck Sack in their newsletter. They would like to feature the school for their new publication Shangri-La. Tejanath has made contact with them and Andrew has offered to further verify with a phone call to make sure this is a valid contact, but it looks like a good opportunity from what we can tell. I'll post more updates as I learn more.
I had a very positive meeting with Tejanath last night filled with wonderful surprises! I must begin by saying that I am so proud of the work that he has accomplished in the past several months while he has not been able to connect regularly with Nabuur due to the ongoing problems with electricity since the flood. He did not let that stop him from continuing to diligently work on the tasks at hand and as a result has achieved GREAT things!
1. Tejanath informed me that the Himalaya Higher Secondary School Library has received a donation of 3000 books!! He had made contact with a book distributer in Kathmandu, and Ratna Book Distributers and M.K. Publisher's and received assistance from all. I thought this was great news and then he added that a local man has expressed intent finance a new library building as well. Tejanath was so pleased with these accomplishments, he told me he felt this goal with the project here at Nabuur had been accomplished.
2. Tejanath also worked with the school management committee at the small school for the deaf to write several proposals, and two of them were granted. This allowed for a computer and color television set to be donated to the school. They were also granted around $5,000 USD by one of the organizations to help make building improvements to the school. As a result of this good work, both of the tasks that were open here were closed as finished.
3. You will see there are several new tasks posted to Nabuur as of this morning. These reflect the remainder of the discussion that Tejanath and I had about what else we can do to help. I encourage you all to take a look at them and see what you can do to help. While the work of SESF will continue to move forward, we both felt that once these things are completed that for all intensive purposes, the project that was proposed and posted here to Nabuur will be finished.
So how is all of that for good news to start your Sunday?? :)
Please let me know if you have any questions about where things stand at this point or about any of the tasks. If we all work together, we should have these things accomplished by the end of the year, or at the very least the beginning of 2009.
I came across this organization last night and thought it might be a good resource to contact if you're interested in bringing volunteers on site to help with the school. You could register the school as an affiliate if you think it might be helpful.
Wow- it's hard to believe that the original goals of SESF have actually been met in a relatively short space of time. Congratulations to Tejanath- and Jennifer you too for all your efforts in bringing all this together. Surely this deserves a headline News item on Nabuur! It's fantastic too see that the principles of Nabuur have actually worked for SESF!
Carolyn
I am happy to report that I was able to talk with Tejanath this morning about several issues and wanted to post an update so you all know where things stand at this point:
1. FAQ: Tejanath has seen the FAQ draft submitted by Carolyn. He noted where more information is needed, but told me that he was not sure how to update the document itself. I encouraged him to just post a reply in the thread with the missing information and that we would update the document so that it can be finalized. He agreed to do that.
2. FACEBOOK GROUP: I asked Tejanath if he had created an account for himself on Facebook so that I can turn over the management of the SESF group there to him and Alyssa. At this point, he has not created an account. He said that he was not sure how to do it, but will look at it again. I explained to him how simple it is to use and update, so he will try to get this done soon.
3. NEWSLETTER: I asked again for Tejanath to provide information that he would like to share in a newsletter for SESF. He said that he has two things in mind; (1) SESF has decided to offer scholarships to 8 students and (2) He would like to let people know about SESF publishing the www.sankhuwasabha.com website. I asked him to provide the content that he wants included so that we can draft up a newsletter template to get them started.
4. WEBSITE: We spent a lot of time talking about the website. Right now, Tejanath has paid for the www.sankhuwasabha site to be developed. He does have administrative access to the site to ADD information, but at the present time he is unable to edit himself what is there from Khandbari. The website developer is supposed to be fixing this and until he does, Tejanath has told him he will not pay him further.
We talked about separating the information about the tourism project from the SESF information and I recommended that if this is still to be included on this website that it be included on a single tab, versus several tabs because then it becomes confusing to the reader what the actual purpose of the site is. I do still think it would be best to have a completely different site for SESF and keep the tourism concept totally separated. Tejanath still hopes that SESF will benefit by establishing this website and earning money from advertising on the site. I cautioned about this because I do not think it is quite that simple.
I asked Tejanath to see if he could access www.weebly.com as Lotte suggested yesterday. It took him quite some time to download the site, but he was able to access it. I asked him to create an account there and look at how it is structured to see if he felt he would be able to update and/or create a website using this as a tool. He said that he would look at it, but again, this was still loading very slow for him.
5. BLOG: I explained to Tejanath that I had talked earlier this week with Rahul about possibly transferring information from the Google blog into a Word Press blog and creating a website there for SESF. Rahul is very willing to set this up, but there may end up being some associated cost and again I am very concerned about finding a solution that is going to be easy for Tejanath to update and access himself so this area is kind of in limbo at the moment. I think ultimately the free options are worth looking at because the more we can minimize expenses the better.
6. INTERNET MARKETING OF SESF: Tejanath and I spoke briefly about different places available online to post information about SESF and market the organization. For now, I believe we'll hold off on anything further until both Tejanath and Alyssa become familiar with these tools and decide which ones they want to use and are comfortable keeping updated.
7. MONEY TRANSFER: Once again, we started talking about transfer of funds. Alyssa had contacted me by email a few weeks ago and mentioned that she had gathered some donations for SESF, but that it is becoming increasingly expensive to transfer the funds. Tejanath believes that Western Union works well for them, but I think there is an associated fee (some of you may be more familiar with this than I am). Ideally we'd like to create a way for people to easily make donations or sponsor a child online. If anyone has any suggestions here we'd be open to looking into them.
I think that's it for now. Tejanath if I forgot anything, please feel free to add.
Hi thanks for the update Jennifer- lots of info to sift through!
I just wanted to give my personal experience of transferring money around the world. I use Western Union and I only incur a AUD$22 fee (that's probably about USD18). I think this is a reasonable fee- but of course the onus is on the the local person to travel to an outlet and pick up the money.
I recently transferred some money to Tej and he was able to retrieve it with minmum fuss. It is not possible to transfer money around the world without incurring a fee- so I guess we just need to find the method that incurs the smallest fee! I believe transferring money directly to a bank account incurs more expensive bank fees and unfortunately this would be a deterrent to potential donors. If we set up the expectation on the website and other marketing info that the donor will probably need to transfer funds via something like Western Union then this would be helpful. With clear instructions, a potential donor will hopefully, not be put off the process of donating.
CDV
You'll notice there are some tasks missing. I closed two tasks tonight as finished:
1. Creating the FAQ document for SESF-many thanks to Carolyn for your work on that and for helping Tejanath finish up the final edits.
2. Update the SESF Blog-the SESF Google Blog site has been deleted and replaced with a new website located here: www.sesf.weebly.com The information in the blog was outdated and not being actively updated so it has been replaced with this website. It should be both easy to access and maintain. Many thanks to Lotte for your good suggestion to make use of this free resource.
I will likely be closing both tasks noted in Step 2 within the next week or two. Edits are ongoing to the www.sankhuwasabha.com website in the Sankhuwasabha village here at Nabuur. I think it is becoming confusing (especially to me) to be trying to conduct edits both here and there and for the most part, I think the SESF information has been edited through previous tasks. Outside of condensing it to one tab, I think we're pretty much done with what we can do.
For now, there is information about SESF posted in 3 places:
I think those 3 things should be manageable and require minimal updating. As Tejanath (and hopefully Alyssa) start to learn more about these sites and get more familiar with them, maybe some new avenues can be considered at that point.
That leaves us with the SESF newsletter. So far we've not made any progress with that. I haven't heard anymore from Grace, so if there's anyone else who wants to give the newsletter a go, please let us know. Grace if you're still working on it, please give us an update so we don't duplicate your efforts.
The Khandbari team has been absolutely wonderful to work with. We've accomplished A LOT this year and the main objectives from when the village was originally posted at Nabuur have been met. Unless Tejanath has anything else in particular he wants us to work on, once the newsletter is accomplished we should be able to close out the village and turn our focus 100% on the tourism project in the Sankhuwasabha village. The work of SESF will continue, but I fully believe that they are a stronger organization because of your efforts.
Thank you so much for all you've done this year. On behalf of Tejanath and SESF, we wish you a very Happy Holiday Season with family and friends.
Hello everyone-
I wanted to provide a short update to let you know that things are still very difficult in Nepal due to the flooding that occurred. Tejanath was able to send me a few instant messages this week, but consistent access to electricity is still problematic. It has been over a month since Tejanath and I have been able to have a conversation due to the difficult situation.
I heard again this week from the Nepali Federation from the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. We have not submitted the proposal they requested as of today's date. I explained the situation to our contact there and they were very understanding. This was the response that I received back;
"I understand the sitution may the life in the eastern hills are still difficult because there is still having heavy rain, However after Oct. 2008 I will be able to have a treak to there and visit the deaf childrens and adults there. I have been thinking to send there a teachere immeditely as the deaf childrens in the resource class there need to be needy thus even there are 4-8 adults I am ready to support them, as I know this is a remote hilly region of Nepal."
That's all I have to update on for now. I'll continue to keep you posted as I hear more from Tejanath. Hopefully he will be able to update soon on the local situation himself.
Have a good weekend-
Jennifer
Hi everyone-
Tejanath and I were finally able to connect briefly on Saturday for about a 10 min chat before he lost power again. He is fine-there is no flooding in Khandbari because this is a hilly area, but the electricty issue continues to be problematic...my understanding is that this IS related to problems stemming from the flooding.
Tejanath has been busy working with the Arun Valley Concern Center to develop an eco-tourism project. Some of you may have seen the Sankuwasabha project posted here at Nabuur. This is for that project. We talked about whether or not this should be a separate village, or included here with ours-or alternatively if maybe we need to close this village and focus on helping them with the eco-tourism project. The entire idea behind this is that if SESF is able to partner with the Arun Valley Concern Center and develop a source of revenue from tourism into the region that they will be in a much better position to meet their goals of ongoing child sponsorship. Just as I asked what Tejanath's preference was...we lost power again, but he did tell me before he left that he sees this project functioning as one instead of two separate villages. I have emailed Romina about this already. Tejanath said he would email me as soon as he had power again.
We also spoke about the school for the deaf. I have heard from the Project Manager at the Nepali Federation for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing and he is considering a trip to the school himself sometime in October to better assess the situation. I still hope we will be able to partner with them for more help for the school.
I apologize for the delays and lack of information here, but it has been very difficult to move things forward without being able to talk with Tejanath on a regular basis. I wanted you all to know that he is doing fine. Hopefully the electricity situation will improve soon.
Warm Regards-
Jennifer
QDDDesr Jennifer
Thank you very much for your posting.
Here we are all fine and everything is ok. Now we (SESF and the Arun Valley concern Centre) are going to publish a website entitled WWW.SANKHUWASABHA.COM soon. I thik it will be published very soon. The designer says it.
I hope our website will be an informative as well as commercial type.
Through the site we hope to earn some money and would like to be self dependent in the future.
I wonder it is possiboe to merge the program into our own Khandbari village.So no other village is necessary to post in the Nabuur.
Firstly we will publish the website. Then we will discussabout it.
I will write more after publishing the website.
Tejanath
Khandbari
Hi everyone-
Tejanath and I were able to talk for quite awhile this morning. This is the first time we've really been able to have a discussion of any length since the flood due to the problem with the electricity and our substantial time difference. The website that Tejanath mentioned www.sankhuwasabha.com has been published. Please take a look at it.
Over the next few weeks, Tejanath and I will be working together to shift the focus of this project toward a tourism concept that the local community wishes to develop. We have had many talks about what could be done to help SESF achieve independence and Tejanath believes that this is a step in the right direction for getting there. SESF has partnered with the Arun Valley Concern Center and the hope is that by working together-SESF will be able to utilize a portion of any incoming revenue as a reliable source of income. They will still need to work on finding donors and other means of financial support as well, but it is hoped that any revenue generatated by this effort will form a consistent foundation of financial support to keep the organization moving forward and help them achieve their goals. The goals of SESF have not changed. They still exist to provide scholarships and a means of financial support for children to go to school who might not otherwise be able to afford it-primarily girls. Tejanath is very excited about the work they have done so far and hopes to post a message tomorrow to tell you more about it.
Stay tuned! Exciting things are on the horizon.
Jennifer
Dear all, neighbors,
Nasmaste!
Sorry for my being late to post any message for a long time. It was because of the problem of electricity, I was unable to have a chat with Mrs. Jennifer wells.
Any I was able to have a chat with her yesterday evening. It was interesting. We had a long chat for about one and a half hour about our project.
It is my pleasure to inform you all that SESF with collaborationof the Arun Valley Concern Centre Khandbari would like help develop tourism business in the district through modern information technology. In this connection we are going to publish a website entitled
www.sankhuwasabha.com
In the website we are going to publish the information about the natural, cultural, biological and historical diversities of the district so that we can attract more and more tourists in the district. Around 1000 tourists have been coming to our district for various purposes every year.
We are also intending to publish advertisements of the various organization related to the tourism business like hotels , guest houses, restaurants ,herbs traders, etc and get some money from them We will also put information of government line agencies and non governmental organizations. We are thinking to put the local weekly news paper published in Khandbari so that the people from Sankhuwasabha living in the various parts of the world can read it and enjoy it With the money we are planning to execute all the programs of SESF independently in a sustainable way.
The website is being designed in Kathmandu by Best Nepal. Some parts of the website has been recently published. Please have a look at the website and and post your valuable suggestions.
I would also like to request you all to donate just a little ( if possible) and help SESF to pay for the site. It has been very difficult for SESF to pay the charge of site designers now.
Thanks
Tejanath Pokharel
LR.
Khandbari
Several months ago, I shared information with Tejanath about an organization called Stuff Your Rucksack (www.stuffyourrucksack.com). Tejanath was recently contacted by Bradt Travel Guides in the UK. Apparently, each month they feature a different charity from Stuff Your Ruck Sack in their newsletter. They would like to feature the school for their new publication Shangri-La. Tejanath has made contact with them and Andrew has offered to further verify with a phone call to make sure this is a valid contact, but it looks like a good opportunity from what we can tell. I'll post more updates as I learn more.
Jennifer
I had a very positive meeting with Tejanath last night filled with wonderful surprises! I must begin by saying that I am so proud of the work that he has accomplished in the past several months while he has not been able to connect regularly with Nabuur due to the ongoing problems with electricity since the flood. He did not let that stop him from continuing to diligently work on the tasks at hand and as a result has achieved GREAT things!
1. Tejanath informed me that the Himalaya Higher Secondary School Library has received a donation of 3000 books!! He had made contact with a book distributer in Kathmandu, and Ratna Book Distributers and M.K. Publisher's and received assistance from all. I thought this was great news and then he added that a local man has expressed intent finance a new library building as well. Tejanath was so pleased with these accomplishments, he told me he felt this goal with the project here at Nabuur had been accomplished.
2. Tejanath also worked with the school management committee at the small school for the deaf to write several proposals, and two of them were granted. This allowed for a computer and color television set to be donated to the school. They were also granted around $5,000 USD by one of the organizations to help make building improvements to the school. As a result of this good work, both of the tasks that were open here were closed as finished.
3. You will see there are several new tasks posted to Nabuur as of this morning. These reflect the remainder of the discussion that Tejanath and I had about what else we can do to help. I encourage you all to take a look at them and see what you can do to help. While the work of SESF will continue to move forward, we both felt that once these things are completed that for all intensive purposes, the project that was proposed and posted here to Nabuur will be finished.
So how is all of that for good news to start your Sunday?? :)
Please let me know if you have any questions about where things stand at this point or about any of the tasks. If we all work together, we should have these things accomplished by the end of the year, or at the very least the beginning of 2009.
Enjoy the rest of your weekend!
Jennifer
Tejanath-
I came across this organization last night and thought it might be a good resource to contact if you're interested in bringing volunteers on site to help with the school. You could register the school as an affiliate if you think it might be helpful.
http://kidsworldwide.org/index.html
Jennifer
Wow- it's hard to believe that the original goals of SESF have actually been met in a relatively short space of time. Congratulations to Tejanath- and Jennifer you too for all your efforts in bringing all this together. Surely this deserves a headline News item on Nabuur! It's fantastic too see that the principles of Nabuur have actually worked for SESF!
Carolyn
Just wanted to let you all know for all who are interested,the Sankhuwasabha village is now open.
Jennifer
Dear Jennifer
It is great! you have done a lot.
I will do mu work as soon as possible.
Tejanath
Khandbari
Sankhuwasbah
Hi everyone-
I am happy to report that I was able to talk with Tejanath this morning about several issues and wanted to post an update so you all know where things stand at this point:
1. FAQ: Tejanath has seen the FAQ draft submitted by Carolyn. He noted where more information is needed, but told me that he was not sure how to update the document itself. I encouraged him to just post a reply in the thread with the missing information and that we would update the document so that it can be finalized. He agreed to do that.
2. FACEBOOK GROUP: I asked Tejanath if he had created an account for himself on Facebook so that I can turn over the management of the SESF group there to him and Alyssa. At this point, he has not created an account. He said that he was not sure how to do it, but will look at it again. I explained to him how simple it is to use and update, so he will try to get this done soon.
3. NEWSLETTER: I asked again for Tejanath to provide information that he would like to share in a newsletter for SESF. He said that he has two things in mind; (1) SESF has decided to offer scholarships to 8 students and (2) He would like to let people know about SESF publishing the www.sankhuwasabha.com website. I asked him to provide the content that he wants included so that we can draft up a newsletter template to get them started.
4. WEBSITE: We spent a lot of time talking about the website. Right now, Tejanath has paid for the www.sankhuwasabha site to be developed. He does have administrative access to the site to ADD information, but at the present time he is unable to edit himself what is there from Khandbari. The website developer is supposed to be fixing this and until he does, Tejanath has told him he will not pay him further.
We talked about separating the information about the tourism project from the SESF information and I recommended that if this is still to be included on this website that it be included on a single tab, versus several tabs because then it becomes confusing to the reader what the actual purpose of the site is. I do still think it would be best to have a completely different site for SESF and keep the tourism concept totally separated. Tejanath still hopes that SESF will benefit by establishing this website and earning money from advertising on the site. I cautioned about this because I do not think it is quite that simple.
I asked Tejanath to see if he could access www.weebly.com as Lotte suggested yesterday. It took him quite some time to download the site, but he was able to access it. I asked him to create an account there and look at how it is structured to see if he felt he would be able to update and/or create a website using this as a tool. He said that he would look at it, but again, this was still loading very slow for him.
5. BLOG: I explained to Tejanath that I had talked earlier this week with Rahul about possibly transferring information from the Google blog into a Word Press blog and creating a website there for SESF. Rahul is very willing to set this up, but there may end up being some associated cost and again I am very concerned about finding a solution that is going to be easy for Tejanath to update and access himself so this area is kind of in limbo at the moment. I think ultimately the free options are worth looking at because the more we can minimize expenses the better.
6. INTERNET MARKETING OF SESF: Tejanath and I spoke briefly about different places available online to post information about SESF and market the organization. For now, I believe we'll hold off on anything further until both Tejanath and Alyssa become familiar with these tools and decide which ones they want to use and are comfortable keeping updated.
7. MONEY TRANSFER: Once again, we started talking about transfer of funds. Alyssa had contacted me by email a few weeks ago and mentioned that she had gathered some donations for SESF, but that it is becoming increasingly expensive to transfer the funds. Tejanath believes that Western Union works well for them, but I think there is an associated fee (some of you may be more familiar with this than I am). Ideally we'd like to create a way for people to easily make donations or sponsor a child online. If anyone has any suggestions here we'd be open to looking into them.
I think that's it for now. Tejanath if I forgot anything, please feel free to add.
Warm Regards-
Jennifer
Hi thanks for the update Jennifer- lots of info to sift through!
I just wanted to give my personal experience of transferring money around the world. I use Western Union and I only incur a AUD$22 fee (that's probably about USD18). I think this is a reasonable fee- but of course the onus is on the the local person to travel to an outlet and pick up the money.
I recently transferred some money to Tej and he was able to retrieve it with minmum fuss. It is not possible to transfer money around the world without incurring a fee- so I guess we just need to find the method that incurs the smallest fee! I believe transferring money directly to a bank account incurs more expensive bank fees and unfortunately this would be a deterrent to potential donors. If we set up the expectation on the website and other marketing info that the donor will probably need to transfer funds via something like Western Union then this would be helpful. With clear instructions, a potential donor will hopefully, not be put off the process of donating.
CDV
Hi everyone-
You'll notice there are some tasks missing. I closed two tasks tonight as finished:
1. Creating the FAQ document for SESF-many thanks to Carolyn for your work on that and for helping Tejanath finish up the final edits.
2. Update the SESF Blog-the SESF Google Blog site has been deleted and replaced with a new website located here: www.sesf.weebly.com The information in the blog was outdated and not being actively updated so it has been replaced with this website. It should be both easy to access and maintain. Many thanks to Lotte for your good suggestion to make use of this free resource.
I will likely be closing both tasks noted in Step 2 within the next week or two. Edits are ongoing to the www.sankhuwasabha.com website in the Sankhuwasabha village here at Nabuur. I think it is becoming confusing (especially to me) to be trying to conduct edits both here and there and for the most part, I think the SESF information has been edited through previous tasks. Outside of condensing it to one tab, I think we're pretty much done with what we can do.
For now, there is information about SESF posted in 3 places:
1. Facebook Group
2. SESF Website (www.sesf.weebly.com)
3. Sankhuwasabha website (www.sankhuwasabha.com)
I think those 3 things should be manageable and require minimal updating. As Tejanath (and hopefully Alyssa) start to learn more about these sites and get more familiar with them, maybe some new avenues can be considered at that point.
That leaves us with the SESF newsletter. So far we've not made any progress with that. I haven't heard anymore from Grace, so if there's anyone else who wants to give the newsletter a go, please let us know. Grace if you're still working on it, please give us an update so we don't duplicate your efforts.
The Khandbari team has been absolutely wonderful to work with. We've accomplished A LOT this year and the main objectives from when the village was originally posted at Nabuur have been met. Unless Tejanath has anything else in particular he wants us to work on, once the newsletter is accomplished we should be able to close out the village and turn our focus 100% on the tourism project in the Sankhuwasabha village. The work of SESF will continue, but I fully believe that they are a stronger organization because of your efforts.
Thank you so much for all you've done this year. On behalf of Tejanath and SESF, we wish you a very Happy Holiday Season with family and friends.
Warm Regards-
Jennifer
idon't no much about your progromm,but iwant to be one of this. what can i do? please help
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wanjala